The variable media paradigm pairs creators with museum and media consultants to imagine potential futures for works in ephemeral formats, including digital media, performances, and installations. The initiative aims to define each of these case studies in terms of medium-independent behaviors and to identify the best strategies for preserving work with the help of an interactive questionnaire.

The Variable Media Network proposes an unconventional preservation strategy based on identifying ways that creative works might outlast their original medium.

This strategy emerged from the Guggenheim Museum’s efforts to preserve its world-renowned collection of conceptual, minimalist and video art. The growth of the Variable Media has been supported by the Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art, Science, and Technology, and subsequently promoted by the Forging the Future alliance. The aim of this diverse network of organizations is to develop the tools, methods and standards needed to rescue creative culture from obsolescence and oblivion.

Choose among the links at left to learn more about this approach or click on a featured resource below:

For creators working in ephemeral formats who want posterity to experience their work more directly than through second-hand documentation or anecdote, the variable media paradigm encourages creators to define their work independently from medium so that the work can be translated once its current medium is obsolete.

This requires creators to envision acceptable forms their work might take in new mediums, and to pass on guidelines for recasting work in a new form once the original has expired.

Select an option at left to learn more about how this philosophy can be applied to specific cases.

These are among the dozens of case studies examined by the Variable Media Network.

As its name suggests, the variable media approach looks for common denominators across different mediums.

Choose a link at left to see how artworks in very different mediums can exhibit the same behavior and provoke comparable preservation solutions.

The variable media paradigm looks
at artworks not in terms of mutually exclusive technologies like film
or video, but in terms of overlapping medium-independent behaviors that
need to be preserved for the essence of the artwork to remain viewable.
To uncover these behaviors, it helps to compare artworks created
in entirely different mediums that present similar preservation
challenges.

Meg Webster's
installation Stick Spiral (1986), bears no
obvious resemblance to a performance such as Robert
Morris's Site (1964). Nevertheless, installing
Stick Spiral requires not merely re-creating the appearance of the original,
but also following a definite procedure—in this case filling a room with
recently cut branches from the nearby area pruned for a reason
other than the exhibition. In this sense, Webster's installation is
performed. While Site is performed by a male and female dancer manipulating plywood boards
and other props onstage, Stick Spiral is performed by curators and museum staff in
the act of gathering materials necessary to recreate the installation. Both works require
archiving instructions or a score for these
performances to be reenacted in the future—a shared behavior.

In another comparison
of two artworks created in different mediums, Felix
Gonzalez-Torres's Untitled (Public Opinion) (1991) would seeing
to have little in common with Mark Napier's net.flag (2001). The former is a candy spill in a museum, while the
latter is an image of a flag on a Web site. However, both works are based
on interchangeable parts: mass-produced commodities on the one hand and digital
files on the other. Both works are also meant to be interactive, since
visitors can take free candies from the Gonzalez-Torres and online visitors
can modify Napier's flag by adding or subtracting parts of flags of various
nations. Because of these similarities, re-creating these works will raise
similar questions, such as how to re-create the work once its technology
of duplication is obsolete and whether traces of previous visitors should
be erased or retained in future exhibitions of the work.

The variable media approach looks at creative works through some new lenses.

Choose a link at left to see a description of variable media behaviors (medium-independent attributes) or strategies (approaches to translating a work into the future).

contained

In the variable media paradigm, even paintings
and sculptures can provoke prickly questions when some aspect of their
construction alters or requires an intervention. Such works are "contained"
within their materials or a protective framework that encloses or supports
the artistic material to be viewed. To account for these alterations in
otherwise stable mediums, the Variable Media Questionnaire asks questions
such as whether a protective coating is appropriate, whether surface qualities
such as brushwork or gloss are essential to the work, or whether an artist-made
frame can be replaced.

For the purposes of variable media guidelines,
to say that a work must be "installed" implies that its
physical installation is more complex than simply hanging it on a nail.
Examples of artworks with this behavior are works that scale to fill a
given space or make use of unusual placement such as the exterior of a
building or a public plaza. For such works, the Variable Media Questionnaire
tracks issues of site-specific placement as well as scale, public access,
and lighting.

In the variable media paradigm, "performed"
works include not only dance, music, theater, and performance art, but
also works for which the process is as important as the product. For such
works, the Variable Media Questionnaire ascertains instructions that actors,
curators, or installers must follow to complete the work, in addition
to more conventional performance considerations such as cast, set, and
props.

While the word is most commonly applied
to electronic media such as computer-driven installations and Web sites,
interactivity also describes installations that allow visitors to manipulate
or take home components of a physical work. The Variable Media Questionnaire
tracks such considerations as the type of interface; the method by which
visitors modify the work; and the form in which traces of such input are
recorded.

In the variable media paradigm, a recording
medium is "reproduced" if any copy of the original master of
the work results in a loss of quality. Such media include analog photography,
film, audio, and video.

Examples of reproduced
works

Stan DouglasDer Sandmann, 1995. Film installation.

Robert SmithsonHotel Palenque, 1969. Slide installation.

interchangeable

To say that some aspect of a work can be
interchangeable (also called "duplicated") implies that a copy could not be distinguished from the original
by an independent observer. This behavior applies to artifacts that can
be perfectly cloned, as in digital media, or to artifacts comprising readymade,
industrially fabricated, or mass-produced components.

To say that a work is encoded implies that
part or all of it is written in computer code or some other language that
requires interpretation (eg. dance notation). In the case of works with
nondigital components, this code can sometimes be archived separately
from the work itself.

A networked work is designed to be
viewed on an electronic communication system, whether a Local Area Network
(LAN) or the Internet. Networked media include Web sites, e-mail, and
streaming audio and video.

The variable media paradigm allows creators to choose
from four strategies to tackle the obsolescence of a particular
medium, such as the bulbs of Dan Flavin's fluorescent light installations.

Storage
The most conservative collecting strategy-the default
strategy for most museums-is to store a work physically, whether that means
mothballing dedicated equipment or archiving digital files on disk. Storing
one of Flavin's fluorescent light installations simply means buying a supply
of the out-of-production bulbs and putting them in a crate. The major disadvantage
of storing obsolescent materials is that the work will expire once these
ephemeral materials cease to function.

Emulation
To emulate a work is to devise a way of imitating the original look
of the piece by completely different means. Emulating a Flavin fluorescent light
installation would require custom-building fluorescent bulbs that
produce the same light as and resemble the physical appearance of the original
bulbs. Possible disadvantages of emulation include prohibitive
expensive and inconsistency with the artist's intent. For example, Flavin
deliberately chose to use ordinary off-the-shelf components rather than esoteric
materials or techniques.

Migration
To migrate an work involves upgrading equipment and source material.
The obsolete fluorescent bulbs of Flavin's light installation could be upgraded to
fluorescent or halogen lights of comparable hue and brightness. The major
disadvantage of migration is the original appearance of the work will probably
change in its new medium. Even if state-of-the-art fixtures cast similar light to
Flavin's originals, the actual fixtures are likely to look different.

Reinterpretation
The most radical preservation strategy is to reinterpret the
work each time it is re-created. To reinterpret a Flavin light installation would
mean to ask what contemporary medium would have the metaphoric value of
fluorescent light in the 1960s. Reinterpretation is a dangerous technique when
not warranted by the artist, but it may be the only way to re-create performance, installation, or
networked art designed to vary with context.

The Variable Media Network has developed a number of resources to help advance the preservation of art in new and ephemeral media.

Choose a link at left to find out more about the variable media questionnaire or to download the latest variable media publication.

The Variable Media Questionnaire is an interactive form linked to a database and designed to assist creators and preservationists in writing variable media guidelines. The questionnaire is not intended to be exhaustive, but is intended to spur questions that must be answered in order to capture creators' desires about how to translate their work into new mediums once the work's original medium has expired.

Now available as a free Web service built by the Forging the Future alliance, the third-generation Questionnaire introduced a shift from the previous two versions by viewing the fundamental unit of an artwork as not the artwork itself, but the parts that are fundamental to its operation. In an attempt to capture as many impressions of the work as possible, questions about those components are posed to not just the artist whose name is on the wall next to the piece but also the curators, conservators, assistants, and even viewers who have experienced the work.

That said, the modern reality of art is that it is not enough to treat an artwork as just a collection of physical parts, and so the third-generation Questionnaire also recognizes environments, user interactions, motivating ideas, and external references as aspects to be surveyed and considered when preserving or recreating the piece. Expanding the scope of the data collected by the questionnaire often influences the way that artists, collectors, and scholars approach the artwork that it catalogues.

Permanence Through Change: The Variable Media Approach presents viewpoints, methods and case studies concerning the preservation of art created with non-traditional materials, tools and technologies. It includes texts by such authors as Bruce Sterling, Steve Dietz, Jon Ippolito, John Handhardt, and Nancy Spector, as well as excerpts from the 2001 "Preserving the Immaterial" conference.

The Variable Media Network has organized numerous public and private events, most recently an exhibition and conference on emulation as a preservation strategy.

Choose a link at left to learn more about these events.

The exhibition Seeing Double: Emulation in Theory and Practice, at the Guggenheim Museum from 19 March to 16 May 2004, pairs artworks in endangered mediums
side by side with their re-created doubles--and sometimes triples--in newer mediums,
offering visitors a unique opportunity to judge whether the emulated works capture the
spirit of the originals.

Over the course of the Seeing Double exhibition, the Guggenheim surveyed artists, preservation experts, and the general public to assess the success or failure of the re-creations on view. "Echoes of Art: Emulation As a Preservation Strategy," a symposium offered on 8 May 2003 at the Guggenheim, divulges the results of this survey to stimulate a discussion about the role of emulation in keeping digital culture alive. Artists, programmers, conservators, curators, gamers, and intellectual property experts debate the merits of this approach and place the issues of technological obsolescence in a cultural context.

"Preserving the Immaterial," a conference held at the Guggenheim in New York in March of 2001, was the first public presentation about the variable media paradigm. Participants included artists Ken Jacobs, Robert Morris, Mark Napier, and Meg Webster as well as preservation specialists Jennifer Crowe, Steve Dietz, Jon Gartenberg, Richard Rinehart, Jeff Rothenberg, and Benjamin Weil.